Collaborating with Cisco WebEx Cloud

Over the last six months, I’ve talked with numerous customers and partners. One thing is clear: People get it. Connecting employees, vendors, partners, and customers — so they can work together with no barriers — makes sense. It saves money and time, and builds relationships.

It seems like overnight we landed in a post-PC world — a place where working from anywhere, anytime is how it is every day. Two technology trends are driving this new work-style while embracing the existing IT landscape: cloud-based applications and smart mobile devices.

Cloud-based services are already familiar in the consumer world — with music, storage, and social media — and in the business world with customer relationship management (CRM) and other transactional applications. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) model offers well-known benefits to IT — such as rapid deployment, flexibility to meet changes in demand, and the ability to shift costs from capital to a predictable operating expenses — all while providing an “always on” service that is available anytime, anywhere.

I keep coming back to that: anytime, anywhere. It is the touchstone for this new work model. Smart mobile devices are the perfect complements to cloud-based services. We can have consistent access to information from different devices and locations throughout the working day. Check email, join a conference call, or participate in a video conference — all from your smartphone, notebook, tablet, or desktop. Whether you are on the road, in the office, or at home — place doesn’t matter. The Cisco WebEx cloud collaboration applications are hosted on the Cisco WebEx Cloud, a platform that supports nearly two billion meeting minutes per month between 30 million participants in 231 countries.

The architecture, infrastructure, and operational procedures were all designed to deliver an enterprise-class collaboration service. The Cisco WebEx Cloud employs enterprise-grade security measures from the platform to the meeting, with stringent data privacy and integrated policy controls. Annual third-party audits validate these measures for compliance with rigorous industry standards. For more information, read the whitepaper entitled Unleash the Power of Highly Secure, Real-time Collaboration.

Another benefit of this intelligent network design is continuous service availability. All traffic is globally load balanced between servers and switches throughout the cloud and automatically replicated to a physically separate backup node. These measures ensure resources are always available — whether for scheduled or ad hoc usage — at any time of day or night.

Folks often ask about the top things they should be thinking about when evaluating cloud-based collaboration.

I recommend focusing on high availability/resilience, scalability, performance, security, user productivity, offline productivity, and investment protection. Vendor selection is also a key concern. Consider maturity and vision in the choosing your vendors. We recently posted a whitepaper on this topic. Read it for more details.

It looks like SSAE-16 replaces the SAS-70. WebEx use to have ISO17799 attestation. Does the ISO27001 replace that as well?
Is WebEx certified for FISMA at the Federal level and DIACAP at the DoD level? I thought it once was or was working towards those certifications.
Jeff, thanks.

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